Published June 2005

Document customer service
activity to understand
your market’s mind-set

One of the odd things about business is that even though it is at the center of our daily lives, it has almost no history.

Sports have history. There are people who can tell you everything about this year’s Mariners, for example, and most of us have at least one friend who can recount highlights from games the team played 20 years ago.

Business, by contrast, seems to be one of those things where we keep records — but no history. In one sense, this is a good thing. Business is, and should be, less about yesterday than about tomorrow. But the changing nature and raw speed of market competition makes what happened yesterday important — in ways that businesses didn’t have to contend with just a few years ago.

The biggest change is in how information from customer service is driving both marketing strategies and the characteristics of new products.

Just a few years ago, management theory was pushing us in the other direction. As an outgrowth of the empowerment movement, the front-line people dealing directly with customers were encouraged, and authorized, to deal with any issues or problems on the spot. There was no need to bring in management.

Customer service was, in general, much improved by the empowerment movement, as was the overall attitude and morale of workers. And management was able to devote more time to what it viewed as the more important stuff about sales, costs, margins and profits.

What disappeared for management, though, was a direct and immediate sense of what was going on at the crucial, customer level of the business.

This would not have been significant if some meaningful history of customer service actions was available, but this was not generally the case. The purpose of the empowerment movement, after all, was to empower someone to deal with problems, not record and analyze them.

Now, though, the nature of the marketplace is changing.

Businesses are increasingly expected to “read minds” and figure out not only what their customers are doing but also what they are thinking. If you are concentrating on the traditional information — the sales, costs and margins data — you are likely to be slow to respond to changes. And few of us can afford to “lose a step” to our competition.

And that is where history comes in.

Every business has contact with customers, but few of us have any systematic way of looking at these contacts to determine what was on their minds. Most of us, instead, use the same combination of the same two ingredients to make product and market strategy decisions: sales data (“Sales of our cabbage-flavored bottled water are up 18 percent in New England”); and anecdotal recollections (“We’ve had four complaints about lightning strikes hitting our new spiked helmets”).

There is nothing wrong with using this data, but in today’s market, we have to combine them with the information on our customers’ thoughts and intentions.

There is no textbook or standard way to do this that fits all businesses. But these are a few of the things that seem to be working well for firms in this area:

• If you don’t have a Web site, get one — no matter how small your business is or even if you can’t see how it could help. And pay close attention to the section that is commonly called “contact us.” Make sure that it is easy to use. The World Wide Web has become the way for customers to communicate their thoughts and opinions. They are far more likely to e-mail a message to your business than they are to write a letter or to telephone. Make sure that every e-mail message is acknowledged (except for the obscene or junk ones that still plague Web sites) and that the ones requiring action get it.
• Start logging your customer-initiated contacts — whether e-mail, telephone, letters or other source. If your business is tiny, a simple notebook will do. As you grow, you will find that computer-based files yield more useful information and are a lot easier to share.
• Make it a team effort. If your business is large enough to have customer service specialists, make sure that they know why you need this information about what your customers are thinking. And bring your customer service people into the information-evaluation process. No form, no computer file can capture the “atmospherics” of customer communications, and your people who spend all day with customer contacts are a valuable insight into this.

The specific method of collection is far less important than recognizing that the information is there and that you need it to compete in today’s market. And the extra attention to customer service won’t hurt your business, either.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.

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